Four Readings of Place and Brand Leadership

In a review of trends and conceptual models, Kavaratzis (2005) offers a reading of place branding as the application of marketing practices beyond physical goods and services, in the context of deindustrialization. Branding is conceived as a form of communication, in which brand identities mediate between the activities of brand owners and consumer perceptions. Considered as a form of place management, place branding is thus positioned as the attempt to alter the way that places are perceived by specific groups of people – to develop and disseminate a recognizable identity for a place in order to promote processes considered desirable, such as inward financial investment, tourism or the development of political capital (Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2005). These concerns inform Hankinson’s (2007) principles for destination brand management and Gnoth’s (2007) functional, experiential and symbolic dimensions of destination brands. While branding as place management might appeal to those charged with supporting regional growth and sustainability, the task is far from simple. Unlike product markets, notions of place exist in the minds of a wide variety of actors prior to attempts to brand them. Thus the branding of places – neighborhoods, cities, regions – as attractive and sustainable requires collaborative networking, entrepreneurship and innovation, knowledge sharing and cross-boundary learning. In short, the complexity and political dimensions of the task implies a need for leadership. While reconceptualizing “place” in this way has immediate consequences for the nature of leadership required, place leadership is itself a field which remains relatively under-theorized to date. Our intention in this chapter is to propose discourse as a fresh and theoretically informed way to explore the leadership of place branding. By offering four different “readings”, we begin to identify contested assumptions of what is required to lead effectively in complex, sometimes chaotic, policy environments, working across institutional, professional, territorial and community boundaries.